1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to improvements in the mounting and housing of edge connector assemblies used in conjunction with printed circuit boards. The edge connector is used to connect a disk drive, or another computer peripheral such as a tape drive, floppy drive, optical drive, etc. to the printed circuit board.
2. Description of the Prior Art
When testing and preparing a disk drive prior to final assembly, it is necessary to plug the disk drive into a test system. In the prior art, two conventional plug in assemblies are used. The most common assembly is a flexible cable which has a mating female plug member at one end to accommodate the male fingers from the disk drive and a PC joining plug at the other end of the cable to plug into the printed circuit board in the computer. While the flexible cable provides a flexible connector assembly to accommodate various disk drives, it also presents several problems. First, when testing a lot of disk drives, the constant motion of plugging the flexible cable into one drive after another creates a substantial possibility of damaging the cables or the mating prongs or pins on the disk drives. In addition, a second problem is the likelihood that the cable will be plugged in backwards, causing faulty readings and possible power shortages. Plugging in the cable backwards may also damage the disk drive or the computer printed circuit board.
Another common assembly is a fixed edge connector which is attached to the test printed circuit board at a location adjacent one edge, with the mating female openings aligned with the edge and ready to receive the male prongs or pins from the disk drive. This method of connection is a substantial improvement over the flexible cable because it allows for a simple sliding motion of the male prongs of the disk drive into the female openings of the edge connector, thereby substantially reducing the possibility of damaging either the edge connector or the disk drive prongs. It also eliminates the possibility of plugging in the edge connector backwards into the disk drive. One drawback with the fixed edge connector is that the location of the mating male prongs on the disk drive are not always the same from one drive to the next. With the flexible cable this is not a problem because the connector member of the cable can be easily moved to the location of the mating male prongs of the disk drive. With a fixed pair of edge connectors, such movement is not possible. A typical test printed circuit board has two spaced apart edge connectors, which utilizes any combination of two from 20, 34 and 50 pin connectors. Since the mating prongs of different disk drives are spaced at different locations, the prongs from one disk drive may be accommodated in a given test printed circuit board with two fixed edge connectors which pin size matches the prongs from the disk drive. Therefore, it is necessary to have a multiplicity of different test printed circuit boards with the various combinations of correct pin numbers and spaced apart location of the two edge connectors to accommodate the various disk drive prong configurations.
Therefore, a significant need exists for a connector assembly which combines the advantages of a flexible cable connector in accommodating any desired locations of the male prongs of the disk drive with the edge connector advantages of easy slidable connecting motion and elimination of the problem of plugging in the connector backwards.